


I Am the One You Love

by Rivine



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Demonic Possession, F/F, Friendship, Original Works Exchange Treat, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 02:31:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16358996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivine/pseuds/Rivine
Summary: “That was the first thing I knew about you,” Nia said. “I was talking to the elders on my first day, and your grandmother told me you were the one who gave me the honey.”“And the second thing you found out about about me was that I was odd, wasn’t it?” Maran asked.





	I Am the One You Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [geckoholic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/gifts).



Maran left Nia a bundle of lichen, a bright, almost violent splash of yellow-green next to the dark brown hides that covered Nia’s bone hut and the light brown dirt and dead grass by her doorway. It was an old hut, built out of mammoth jaw bones stacked in a ring, topped with tusks arching up to create the dome of the roof and leg bones and scapulae latticed in between them. In front of the entrance was a mammoth skull, swirled with red lines and dots that Nia repainted each year on the spring equinox. It had been the village mage’s hut for a dozen generations, and the chieftan’s before that, and when it was new it had belonged to one of the bigger families, when there were still other bone huts standing and the forest was an open plain. Nia took care of it well, now that it was hers, and Maran liked that.

Looking at the neatly painted skull reminded Maran that the last time she had been inside chatting with Nia, there had been a thin, new crack in one of the tusks. When the winter came, it was likely to grow wider, no matter how closely Nia tended her fire and kept the hides oiled against the damp. Maran would have to figure out how to fix that. She had several days yet to think on it before Nia returned from her visit to her old teacher, the Great Mage in the Southeast. Maran would need to find a replacement tusk that was long enough, and had been protected from the stresses of the weather. By the river’s edge would be best, if she could manage it, so part of the tusk could be exposed by the bank.

Maran walked back through the village, remembering the lay of the land and where the river cut through the turf into ancient clay. She smiled vaguely at the villagers she passed on her way, people who had known her since she was a small child and expected the solitariness and absent-mindedness that often came over her, and didn’t think it odd for her to continue past the outskirts and into the forest with no clear reason for going. She would gather a few mushrooms on her way back, she decided, even though she had no basket, to give a token reason for her disappearance.

When she was well out of sight, Maran broke into a run. She loped steadily, easily, jumping fallen logs and dodging patches of tangled brush, her breath coming free and light. It was good to run, the way she only could when she was alone and there was no one to see her take her body to its limits and hold it there. She raced along the shallow ridge where the aspens grew smaller and thinner, showered in their golden leaves whenever a gust of wind sent them flying. A small trickle of water caught her eye, and she swerved to follow it. It didn’t matter where she met the river, as long as it was before the great wash were she hoped to find a new tusk. She might as well chase this stream through its twisting course.

She startled two deer and a vixen before she came to the junction of the stream and the river. She hadn’t seen a fox in a while, so she took it as a good omen as she carried on up the river. The bank was steep at times, and the clay was wet and slippery. She had to slow her run to keep from skidding down into the water. Eventually she came to a place where the river narrowed and the bank rose high above the water, and as she came to the top of a hill, she saw the wash spread out below. Part of the hillside had fallen into the river a while back, leaving a wide, shallow, gravelly swath and a jumble of logs spanning the river where its course closed in again. The naked earth of the hillside was too steep to have regrown anything but some tufts of grass and a few small clumps of faded wildflowers. Maran skidded her way down to the base of it and walked along, staring up at the rock-studded clay. She knew mammoths had died here, back when the river had run along this same course, before it wandered off to the sides and danced back over the centuries. The animals had tumbled into the river as it raged, had fallen through ice they thought was solid ground, had been buried under landslides like the one Maran hoped would reveal their bones.

She spotted a lump sticking out of the earth, larger and browner than the grey stones around it. Maran scrambled up the slope to it. It had the pitted texture of weathered bone.  None of the other animals in this layer of clay would have a leg bone so large, which only left Maran hoping the rest of the mammoth was buried in the hillside, not washed away in the river. She considered the earth around the jutting end of bone, then climbed past it. The was a shallow bump of clay some ways up the hill, and Maran pulled herself up it. Once she was on top of it, she tested her footing and then jumped, landing as heavily as she could. The clay shifted slightly, but held. It took two more hard jumps to send a crack down through the lump, and another to send it tumbling down the hill. Maran leapt to the side when it gave, clinging to the slope and watching the slide gain more and more earth as it traveled. It swept over the mammoth bone, and Maran saw the curved spears of ribs and the knobby discs of vertebrae join the crumbling clay, and finally two great sweeps of tusk still attached to the skull slid free from the hillside. She waited until the wreckage had settled before skirting carefully around the unstable edge of the new scar and making her way down. 

Dirt had fallen on top of the skeleton as the slide brought it to the river's edge, but one tusk arched up toward the sky, rising taller than Maran. It was easy to see, even better than Maran had hoped for. She studied it, comparing the exposed tusk with her memory of the cracked one in Nia’s hut. It would be long enough, and its curve was close to the one it would replace. Maran was pleased. She hoped her luck would hold when Nia returned. 

 

***

 

“Our beloved mage, you have returned to us!” Maran called out, as Nia came into earshot. “I’ve missed you.” 

Nia raised her arm in acknowledgement. She looked tired, worn out from her trek. Maran gave her a water skin and took her carry basket from her, hoisting the straps over her own shoulders while Nia drank. 

“It was a long walk without you,” Nia said, once she had drunk her fill. “Good as it was to see Aneri, I’m glad to be home again.” 

“The water welcomes you,” Maran said, repeating one of the ritual phrases that had been used to greet Nia when she first entered the village, when they were both young women and Nia was just newly a mage. 

Nia smiled back at her. “It’s made me welcome indeed; when I was a student, I was never so homesick as I was this last sennight.”

Nia had been born off to the East, in a place where children had only one mother, and called that mother’s sisters by some other name. Maran had asked her many questions about it over the years, and Nia had told her as much as she could remember from before she had gone to learn magecraft from Aneri, the Great Mage, as a child. 

“Yes, some children are like salmon,” Maran said, as they started walking along the last turns of the path before it came to the edge of the village. “They aren’t born into the place they’ll belong, or being who they’ll become,” she explained, when Nia gave her the look that meant she hadn’t made herself understood. “They’re only in the river until they can go to where they live. It’s not their home, even when they come back to spawn.” 

“I suppose so,” Nia said. 

They came to the first wood-and-turf huts, and were slowed considerably as they stopped for Nia to greet the other villagers as they passed them by. Being without a mage was a perilous state, and Nia was well-liked besides. Everyone they encountered wanted to welcome her home and ask about her journey, which was as close to inquiring about her time with the Great Mage as courtesy and respect allowed. Nia spoke freely of her travels, and more delicately of her time with her teacher. Much of magecraft could not be talked about outside of sacred spaces, and some things were not permitted at all. Still, Nia left everyone knowing that it had gone well, whatever it was she and the Great Mage had met over. Maran thought the village's old mage would not have reassured them so; she had never met the man, but all spoke of him as a cautious mage, who rarely told anyone more than the bare bones of what they needed to know.

At last they made it to Nia's hut, and Nia laughed to see the bright piles of chartreuse lichen, the pot that was full of slate-blue clay, and the tiny stack of red snail shells that Maran had left for her. 

"You _have_ missed me," Nia said, unstaking the door flap and waving Maran in. She carried the pot in after her, pulling out the stopper to look at the contents.

“Did you doubt it?” asked Maran. She set down Nia's pack and went to retrieve the rest of the things she had put outside her door. No one could enter the bone hut without the mage's permission and presence, not even Maran, who was closer to Nia than anyone. 

Nia shrugged off her traveling cloak and settled onto a sheepskin-covered stool. She began to unpin her braid, and Maran went to her. Nia let her hands fall to her lap as Maran took over sliding the pins from her hair.

“Will you help me prepare all these gifts, then?” Nia asked, her tone teasing but fond. For Nia to use the ingredients Maran had brought her, she would need to boil the lichen until the water was almost gone, knead an array of oils and herbs into the clay, and lightly singe the snail shells over a flame before grinding them into a fine powder. It would be days of work, much of it tedious. 

“Of course I will.” Maran passed Nia the copper pins from her hair, and separated out the strands of Nia’s braid. 

“Thank you. I will be glad of the company.” Nia hesitated a moment. “Especially,” she continued, and put her hand to Maran’s wrist, “since I will be busy around the half-moon. The night itself, and two days on either side.”

Maran stopped finger-combing Nia’s hair to squeeze her hand. There were matters that Nia was obliged to keep from her, but Maran had never had difficulty with secrets. There were things that were private to each of them, and things that they could share, and both had their place. Besides which, the moon would take only a little under a fortnight to grow half-full, leaving ample time before the ground froze and moving the mammoth tusk became more difficult. 

“I had thought to go up the river while the leaves are bright,” Maran said. “I’ll go for a few days and see what I see, and with any luck, I’ll bring even more for you to do when I come back.” 

“You’re a good friend, Maran.”

“Because you make it easy for me to be so,” Maran told her. 

 

***

 

“Nia!” Maran called. 

“Come in,” Nia answered, her voice muffled by the hide walls of her hut. 

Maran pulled aside the door and ducked inside. Nia was sitting by her fire pit, her face turned down toward the bowl she was warming water in. It was a special bowl, Maran saw at once. Copper, instead of clay, with designs engraved around its sides. It was the kind of bowl used in magecraft, and the bitter smell of charred fern root told her what kind. Nia had done a ritual of knowing, to bring herself some glimpse of knowledge from the spirit realm. There was no way for Maran to tell if Nia had spat in the bowl to bring on a vision of blessings to be seized, or bled into it for a warning of harm to be avoided, but she guessed that Nia had done neither, and trusted that whichever knowledge she was most in need of would come to her. 

“Nia?”

“I’m just washing it,” Nia said. “There’s no harm to be done.” She looked up at Maran at last. “Sit down, and tell me of the river.” Her smile came late, and small, and Maran knew she hadn’t sweetened her ceremony. Ill fortune came to every village from time to time, and Maran knew Nia would be troubled sorely by any danger she had seen, however blurry and indistinct it may have been. She had fretted herself silly over the coming of a late spring several years past, insisting on putting by far more food and forage than the villagers had ultimately needed. Maran, as her closest friend, had endured all the protectiveness Nia had left over. 

“I found something.” Maran made sure her excitement showed, so Nia knew it was good thing, not a bad one, that awaited her. 

“What is it?” Nia asked, frowning anyway. 

“No, let it be a surprise. You must come, and see it!” The mystery would be good for her, Maran thought. It would distract her from whatever had brought her spirits low, and then there would be the joy of the mammoth skeleton, and the work of bringing it home and using it to strengthen her house. 

Nia swirled the water in her bowl, looking torn. “Yes,” she said at last, and poured out the water into her fire. “I will come with you.” 

They rolled up Nia’s wisent hide, and packed dried meat and wild oats along with it into the carry basket Maran had left outside. Nia took several small clay pots and leather pouches, betraying her anxiety over her vision. After she had checked her supplies twice over, and spread sand over the embers of her fire, Nia was finally ready to go. 

They walked out of the village under a sunny sky, a light breeze rustling the leaves and carrying the distant sound of geese flying south. They followed a thin path that Maran had scouted while Nia performed her ritual. It was longer than the route Maran had taken to find the mammoth, but it stayed always in sight of the meandering river bank, and it would bring them there without surprise or complication. 

“Do you remember sending me honey?” Nia asked, when the shadows of the trees began to stretch out long across the river. “When I was training to be the mage here?”

“Yes, I remember licking my fingers clean after my mothers put it in the jar, and wondering if you would like it as well as I did.” Maran had asked why her mothers and uncles had set aside food and a pinch of ash from their fire pit, and she had been told it was for the girl down in the Southeast, so she would become their new mage. While she learned her craft, she would eat the food grown and harvested in the fields and forests, drink the water skins filled from the river, and rub the ash from every hearth on her hands, and so the land would be her land, the water her water, and the people her people before she ever set foot in the village.

“That was the first thing I knew about you,” Nia said. “I was talking to the elders on my first day, and your grandmother told me you were the one who gave me the honey.”

“And the second thing you found out about about me was that I was odd, wasn’t it?” Maran asked. 

“I learned that from what she told me, that you snuck away and climbed high up to get to the hive, even though you had only recently recovered from a terrible fall from a tree. She said it had left you delirious and barely able to move, and Lonka thought you were likely to die.” 

Maran remembered that, her sickbed and the struggle to shape words and make her body move as she wished it to, the healer’s hand testing the softness at the back of her head. And before that, the hard roots of the tree underneath her and the wild rush of giddiness. The feeling of the child’s consciousness twisted free and dissipating. 

“And also,” Nia added, “she said that it left you strange afterwards, but I wasn’t to mind that.” 

“My grandmother is a wise woman,” Maran said. 

“She is.” Nia’s voice became softer. “I don’t like to think how close it was that I might never have met you. Lonka is a very good healer, but even her skills have limits, and with the old mage dead, there was no one to tether your spirit while your body was weakened.” 

“You borrow to much worry from a past that turned out well,” Maran told her. “But still, I’m happy to have had the chance to meet you, and be your friend. I think I would have missed that, had things gone differently, even though I wouldn’t know it.”

Nia nodded, and fell silent. She was still somber from whatever misfortune she had seen, but Maran thought she walked more lightly than when they set out, and after they had spoken of the honey, she looked up sometimes at the fiery leaves and paid more interest to the birds and mushrooms Maran pointed out to her. It was good, Maran thought, that she had brought her out here now, when she needed it. 

They stopped for the night in a small clearing, back a bit from the river bank, where the grass and moss made the ground soft. Nia took the wisent hind from the basket to lay out, and Maran went to fill their water skins for the night. 

When Maran returned, Nia was standing next to the hide, waiting for her. There was a circle of black powder sprinkled around the hide, and Nia had one of her pouches open in her hand, no doubt to pour out more if Maran broke the circle. 

“Come inside, Maran,” Nia said. “It will keep out that which means us harm.” 

“If you think it needed,” Maran said, although she thought it a waste of the chaga and of Nia’s time grinding it. But Nia was her friend, and if this precaution soothed her anxiousness over the danger that awaited their village, Maran would not quibble with it. She stepped over the black line, picking her feet up carefully so that Nia could see the powder would be undisturbed by her passing. She sat down on the wisent hide, choosing the side that would be open when they folded half of it over themselves. Nia seemed troubled still, staring at the circle she had drawn around their bed, and tying her pouch closed slowly. 

“Put it from your mind, Nia,” Maran said. “There is nothing that would hurt us here, and it is time to rest.”

Nia sighed. “You must be right, and I’m jumping at shadows.” She lay down beside Maran, her face showing her misgivings. 

Maran tucked the top of the hide under her side, holding the edge closed around them. The thick, wooly fur of the wisent warmed quickly, even as the chill of night crept into the air. The stars kindled in the sky one by one, and Maran could feel the tension in Nia’s body slowly slip away as she fell asleep. She must have dreamed of her fears, however, because her sleep was light and fitful. 

Maran lay awake, watching the moon move across the sky and casting her mind back to earlier times. She liked to remember, while others slept, the older parts of her life. She drifted into memories of the ebb and flow of the forests and ice and animals, and how differently it looked during her restless roamings from when she was settled fast in her body. She let her mind wander back through long-past nights until the sun began to dawn, breaking through the boughs of the trees in thin golden shafts. 

Maran woke Nia when the light grew brighter, and the small patches of frost struck by its warmth had melted. Maran supposed that Nia’s dreams must have worn some of her fears from her, because she seemed more cheerful than the day before. 

“Do you think you could find an adder stone for me?” Nia asked her, as they ate some of their dried meat and oats. “And the claw of a polecat?” 

“If I look, though it may take a little time,” Maran answered, happy that Nia had found a way to ease her worry. A polecat’s claw, tied in a stone with a natural hole through it, was a strong amulet. Nia could hang it off Maran’s belt, and satisfy some of her urge to defend her people until such a time as her protection was truly needed. 

They set out along the river, both with higher spirits than the day before. The water rushed alongside them, sparkling in the morning light, and it wasn’t long until they came to the mouth of the creek Maran had followed on her expedition to find Nia a tusk. She had jumped it then, but on her later journey she had found an easy crossing a little ways up, and that was where she led Nia. 

“It’s only a little slippery where the bark has come off,” she reassured Nia, as she walked out onto the log lying across the stream. “You’ll have no trouble.” 

“Still, I’d rather not risk falling,” Nia told her. She found a fallen branch and tested its strength, before breaking it off to walking-stick length. With the stick to brace her, she started across the log. 

Maran thought all was well, until Nia stopped halfway. She was looking into the water, where her stick was planted in the gravelly bottom. 

“What is it?”

“There’s a salmon redd,” Nia said, sounding upset. “I’ve opened it.”

Sure enough, Maran could see the eggs washing free from the rocks Nia’s walking stick had disturbed. They almost glowed in the sunlight, orange-pink and translucent. 

“You didn’t mean to, Nia.”

Nia looked up at Maran, something odd in her face, and then stared down at the redd again, and the doomed eggs drifting away downstream. Very quietly, she said, “One can mean no harm, and still do it.” 

“The otter who lives here would not call it hurting, to have been shown where its dinner lies. Let it be.” 

Nia nodded, once, and slowly finished crossing the log, carrying her stick but not touching it to the stream bed. Maran took them back to the river bank, walking more quickly to keep Nia’s mind on the path instead of the redd. It didn’t seem to work, however, as whenever Maran glanced back to check on Nia, she caught her wearing a distracted frown. She had kept hold of her walking stick. It was good that she had it when the bank turned to clay and became slick in places, but Maran worried that it was a poor sign for her state of mind.

Maran was relieved when they made it to the bottom of the rise that would let them overlook the slide. Nia seemed to have lost all her good cheer from the morning, and was perhaps even more troubled than she had been the day before. Maran hoped that the surprise of the mammoth tusk would drive away some of her gloom. She led the way up the rise, calling back to Nia that they were almost there. Maran stopped just before the crest, waving Nia on ahead of her. Mammoth remains were considered powerful, and none of the other villagers would intrude on bones that had not been rendered safe by a mage. 

Nia passed Maran and climbed to the top of the hill. Maran heard her draw in her breath sharply.

“Oh, Maran,” she said, her voice thick. 

“You could use it in your hut,” Maran said. “In place of the one that’s cracking.” 

“Yes,” Nia said softly. “Yes, so I could.” She came back to Maran. “But the Great One is dangerous for you until I bind it.” 

Maran nodded. Nia wouldn’t call the mammoth by its name except in rituals, and many of the villagers would avoid speaking of the animals at al. 

“I will protect you, Maran,” Nia said. “You must face the river, and close your eyes.” 

Her voice was firm, confident at last, and so Maran obeyed her, even though the tusk was already blocked from her sight by the crest of the hill. Maran felt her take something out of the carry basket, something light enough that Maran could hardly feel the difference, as she pondered how many people they would need to bring with them next time. The tusk was long, and it would be awkward to carry was well as heavy. It would be best to work in teams, switching out those who tired. 

Over the sound of the river rushing through its channel below her, Maran heard the soft noise of a small stopper being pulled, and the whisper of something dry being brushed against a clay pot. Then there came the sound of Nia dragging the tip of her walking stick along the ground in an arc behind Maran, and Maran began to wonder what Nia was doing. This was different from any of the mammoth ceremonies she knew, but then, Nia had been trained in the Southeast, and there might be other rituals practiced there. 

“Turn around,” Nia said. 

Maran turned, opening her eyes to see Nia’s drawn face. Her gaze was hard, though there was a tremble in her lips. Her walking stick had a raven feather tied to it, and the tip of the feather was chalk-white. It was all wrong.

“Nia?” Maran looked down, and saw the line etched into the clay. It made a full half-circle around her, running to the very edge of the bank on either side. 

“Step over the line.” 

“What are you doing, Nia?” Maran cried. 

A hitch caught at Nia’s voice. “Please, step over the line.” 

Maran stood still, looking at her friend with growing desperation. “No, you mustn’t do this!”

Nia closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath. When she opened them, Maran could see the tears welling up. “Don’t be afraid, Maran,” Nia said. Her voice was shaking, but gentle. “I will help you.” 

“No, Nia—”

“Demon,” Nia said, “leave my friend freely or I will cast you out.” 

“I _am_ your friend,” Maran said. “I have always been your friend.” 

“For the second time I ask you: leave my friend or I will cast you out.” Nia was weeping, but she spoke sharply. 

“Nia, please believe me!”

Nia pulled open the neck of a leather pouch. Maran caught the harsh, acrid smell she had dreaded and stepped back, closer to the edge of the bank.

“You are not Maran, and you will give her back to me, or you will regret it.” Nia stuck her fingers in the pouch, taking a pinch of the fine powder.

Maran jumped back, away from the dust wafting off Nia’s fingers.

“Maran!”

Maran fell, and hit the icy water of the river. 

 

***

 

Maran went to Nia’s hut as dusk turned to true night. She heard sobbing inside, and pulled back the door flap. Nia was lying curled in her bed, her hair still half-braided. 

“Nia,” Maran said. 

Nia startled up from her wisent hide, the hope on her face quickly turning to horror as she saw Maran, still dripping river water, in her doorway. 

“The girl died. When she fell from the tree, she died. You never knew her, only me.”

“No, you’re lying,” Nia said. “The Great One Maran found left her spirit weakened, and you found that weakness.” Nia glanced to her right, eyeing the distance to a row of clay pots. 

“It’s true,” Maran insisted. “I’m the one who has been your friend, all these years.”

“You can’t be.” Nia shook her head. “Maran is no demon.” She slid one foot cautiously toward the pots.

“I am your friend still, Nia, and I mean you no harm. If you cast me out, I will be gone, and there will be no one at all in this body.”

Nia reached out, and Maran leapt away from her door and ran. 

Maran raced through the sleeping village, trying to think of nothing but the impact of each footfall and the rush of air in and out of her lungs. She let the running consume her thoughts and plunged into the forest without slowing. Brush snagged at her hair and tried to tangle her feet, but Maran ran on, until the cold and the exhaustion caught up with her. 

She stopped under a wide, spreading maple, and sat slumped against its broad trunk. Eventually she stirred herself to strip off her wet clothing, and call a fire into being in a handful of twigs. She built it up higher and held her clothes out over it until they steamed and her arms threatened to burn. At some point she would have to eat, Maran knew, but there would be rabbits and grouse and deer she could catch later, and she hadn’t the heart for it yet. She lay down next to the fire and wished she could sleep.

Maran kept her fire burning through the night, watching the flames flicker and the embers crack and glow. When the morning came, she rose stiffly and began walking back to the mammoth. 

A young buck, just out of fawnhood and foolish with it, revived her, and when she came to the mammoth tusk, she was able to dig down to the skull and pull the tusk free with little difficulty. Maran was Nia’s friend, and nothing could keep that from being true. Nia’s hut needed to be fixed, and Maran would help her. 

She slung the tusk across her shoulders like a yoke for buckets, and began to slowly thread her way through the trees. It was slow going, and it gave Maran far too much time to think of Nia, with her eyes reddened from crying. 

Maran made it to the edge of the village before dark, but waited so she could avoid meeting anyone but Nia. She slipped through the huts quietly, careful to keep from scraping one with the ends of the tusk. 

This time Nia was waiting for her, standing in front of her hut with her hands clasped tightly in front of her. Maran dropped the tusk to the ground. 

“I said I’d bring more work for you to do,” Maran said, trying to smile. There was a thin line of burnt chaga around Nia’s hut. Nia stood well inside it, but there was a hint of uncertainty in her eyes. 

“How can I believe you are Maran?” she asked. 

Maran stepped into the circle. “Did you ask my family about when I was ill, after the fall?”

“Yes,” Nia answered reluctantly. “They said you wailed, and couldn’t speak or understand words, and didn’t seem to know what ordinary things were.” 

“It’s different, going from how I was to how I am. It can take time to fit into the differences, sometimes.”

“You are her, then,” Nia said, unhappily. 

“Yes. I’m Maran. I am the one you love.” 

“I told your family you fell into the river after finding a Great One,” Nia said, beginning to cry. “They grieve for you. I didn’t tell them anything else.”

“That was kind of you,” Maran said. “You have always been good at taking care of us, Nia. It’s one of the reasons I’ve loved you so.” 

Something broke in Nia then—either her resolve or her heart—and she reached out to Maran and hugged her close. Maran held her tight, their arms wrapped around one another and Nia’s face pressed into her hair. Nia pulled back to kiss her, once, and then drew back from the embrace. 

“Thank you,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “For the tusk, thank you.” She turned and hurried to her hut, but her sobs broke free before she made it to the door. 

“Nia!” Maran cried out, but Nia pulled back the flap and went inside. 

 

***

 

Maran returned the next night, but at the boundary of the village, there was a line of goose-bone stakes, wrapped with leather thongs that had been dyed red. Maran circled the village, but the stakes were everywhere, a closed ring keeping Maran from entering. Nia had fenced her out. 

She howled then, louder and wilder than when she first became Maran, from the pain of it. 


End file.
